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Limits of ‘authoritarian upgrading’ in Syria

Citation for published version:Pierret, T & Selvik, K 2009, 'Limits of ‘authoritarian upgrading’ in Syria: Private welfare, islamic charities,and the rise of the zayd movement' International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol 41, no. 4, pp. 595-614.DOI: 10.1017/S0020743809990080

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Publisher Rights Statement:Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies / Volume 74 / Issue 02 / June 2011, pp 171-185DOI: 10.1017/S0041977X11000012, Published online: 24 June 2011

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The relationship between maghāzī and adīth in early Islamic scholarship

Andreas Görke

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies / Volume 74 / Issue 02 / June 2011, pp 171 185DOI: 10.1017/S0041977X11000012, Published online: 24 June 2011

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0041977X11000012

How to cite this article:Andreas Görke (2011). The relationship between maghāzī and adīth in early Islamic scholarship. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 74, pp 171185 doi:10.1017/S0041977X11000012

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The relationship between maghāzī and hadīth inearly Islamic scholarship

Andreas GörkeChristian-Albrechts-Universität, [email protected]

AbstractThe relationship between the traditional biographical material onMuhammad (maghāzī- or sīra-material) and the narrations of his wordsand deeds (hadīth-material) has long been debated in Islamic studies.While some scholars have argued that the biographical material is funda-mentally hadīth material arranged chronologically, others have argued theopposite: that hadīth material originally consists of narrative reports aboutthe life of Muhammad which were later deprived of their historical contextto produce normative texts. This article argues that both views are unten-able and that maghāzī and hadīth emerged as separate fields; each influ-enced the other but they preserved their distinctive features. Whiletraditions that originated and were shaped in one field were sometimestransferred to the other, the transfer of traditions from one field to theother apparently did not as a rule involve any deliberate changes to thetext.Keywords: Biography of the Prophet Muhammad, Early Islamic fields oflearning, Historiography, maghāzī, hadīth, sīra, Early Islamic literature

It is a widespread assumption in Islamic studies that the fields of sīra or maghāzīon the one hand and hadīth on the other are closely related and should be studiedtogether.1 While it is obvious that both fields have a great deal in common withregard to content, form and transmission, the nature of their relationship remainsa matter of debate. This article aims to contribute to the discussion of the earlydevelopment of both fields, their distinctive features and their mutual influence.

1 See for instance Meir J. Kister, “The Sīrah literature”, in A.F.L. Beeston et al. (eds), TheCambridge History of Arabic Literature. Arabic Literature to the End of the UmayyadPeriod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 352: “The development ofSīrah literature is closely linked with the transmission of the Hadīth and should beviewed in connection with it”. Marco Schöller (Exegetisches Denken undProphetenbiographie. Eine quellenkritische Analyse der Sīra-Überlieferung zuMuhammads Konflikt mit den Juden (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 1998, 5)), argues thatthe sīra-traditions cannot be studied without taking into account the beginnings ofIslamic legal thinking ( fiqh) and the emergence of the isnād. Josef Horovitz, “Alterund Ursprung des Isnād”, Der Islam 8, 1908, 39–47, 39 f., points to the close relationshipbetween the two fields regarding both form and content and claims that the material pre-sented in sīra works and in hadīth collections is basically the same but is arrangedaccording to different criteria.

Bulletin of SOAS, 74, 2 (2011), 171–185. © School of Oriental and African Studies, 2011.doi:10.1017/S0041977X11000012

For the sake of simplicity, the field of the biography of the Prophet will con-sistently be referred to as maghāzī in what follows, although the sources usedifferent terms, such as sīra, siyar and maghāzī, which may or may not beused interchangeably.2 For our purposes it is of only minor importance whetherthe material relating to the biography of the Prophet was referred to as maghāzīor sīra material.

In the twentieth century two radically different views of the relationshipbetween the fields of maghāzī and hadīth were proposed. According to oneview, maghāzī-material is simply exegetical and juridical hadīth chronologicallyarranged. This view was put forward by Henri Lammens3 and was followed atleast partly by C. H. Becker.4 Becker summarizes Lammens’ view as follows:“In its detailed accounts, which are often diffuse, the Sīra is not an independenthistorical source. It is merely hadīth-material arranged in biographical order. Theindividual hadīths, however, are either exegetical elaborations of Qur’anic allu-sions or later inventions of dogmatic-juristic tendency. [. . .] The actual historicalmaterial is extremely scanty. So the allusions of the Qur’ān are taken andexpanded; and, first and foremost, the already existing dogmatic und juristichadīths are collected and chronologically arranged. The result is the Sīra.”5

Thus, according to this view, the exegetical and juridical ahādīth existedbefore they were used in the maghāzī tradition, and maghāzī material is derivedfrom exegetical and juridical hadīth. As far as I can see, this view is populartoday almost exclusively with regard to exegetical traditions and much lesswith juridical ones.6

According to the other view, the development was the other way round: themaghāzī material is older and maghāzī traditions were deprived of their histori-cal setting and context and reduced to the juridical or theological aspects theycontained to be then used as normative ahādīth. This development, frommaghāzī to hadīth, was proposed by John Wansbrough, who observed a “devel-opment from loosely structured narrative to concise exemplum”7 and concluded:“The movement from narratio to exemplum illustrates perfectly the stylisticdifference between Sīra and Sunna, between the mythic and normative

2 For a discussion of the divergent usages of maghāzī and sīra see Martin Hinds,“‘Maghāzī’ and ‘Sīra’ in early Islamic scholarship”, in Toufic Fahd (ed.), La vie duprophète Mahomet. Colloque de Strasbourg (Paris, 1983), 57–66; cf. Fuat Sezgin,Geschichte des Arabischen Schrifttums, 12 vols (Leiden, 1967–2000), I 251, 275;Maher Jarrar, Die Prophetenbiographie im islamischen Spanien. Ein Beitrag zurÜberlieferungs- und Redaktionsgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), 1–43.

3 See e.g. Henri Lammens, “Qoran et tradition, comment fut composée la vie deMahomed”, Recherches de Science Religieuse 1, 1910, 27–51.

4 Carl Heinrich Becker, “Prinzipielles zu Lammens’ Sīrastudien”, Der Islam 4, 1913,263–9.

5 Becker, “Prinzipielles zu Lammens’ Sīrastudien”, 262; the translation followsW. Montgomery Watt, “The materials used by Ibn Ishāq”, in Bernard Lewis and PeterMalcolm Holt (eds), Historians of the Middle East (London, 1962), 23–34, 23.

6 See e.g. Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987),214 f.: “[I]t should be plain that much of the apparently historical tradition is in fact ofexegetical origin”; Schöller, Exegetisches Denken, 128–33.

7 John Wansbrough, The Sectarian Milieu. Content and Composition of Islamic SalvationHistory (Oxford, 1978), 77.

172 A N D R E A S G Ö R K E

preoccupations (Geistesbeschäftigungen) of early Muslim literature”.8 Hefurther remarked that it is possible to trace a theme “from the sīra-maghāzī lit-erature, where it was historically articulated, to the sunna-hadīth literature,where it was idealized and hence shorn of its historical dimension”.9

Wansbrough’s main argument, that the narrative biographical interest inMuhammad preceded the interest in him as an authority for legal matters, isnot our concern here. However, Wansbrough also argued that this developmentcan be observed in the study of single hadīths.10 A similar view was held byTilman Nagel, who observed in the hadīth literature an aim to eliminate histori-cal contexts and instead create timeless, universally valid statements.11 MartinHinds seems in general to subscribe to Wansbrough’s view, but sees the devel-opment as being rather “from maghāzī to sunna via siyar and then sīra”.12

Both views imply that traditions originate in one field and are then transferredto another, being reshaped on the way. While this seems likely, it is difficult toprove. It has long been known that traditions were not stable and underwent con-siderable changes in the course of transmission and the process can easily bedemonstrated by comparing several versions of the same tradition.13 The maindifficulty lies in establishing where a tradition, which can now be found indifferent genres of literature, originated. If it can be shown that a tradition origi-nated in one field and was only later used in others, we may gain valuableinsights into the mechanisms that govern this kind of transfer.

A glimpse at the material in question shows us that all observations regardingthe relationship between maghāzī and hadīth only apply to a part of the material.There are a vast number of traditions in the hadīth collections which have noparallel in the works on maghāzī, for example a large part of the materialwith ritual content. On the other hand, the books on maghāzī comprise muchmore than just hadīth: apart from traditions given with an isnād, some ofwhich may also be included in collections of hadīth, there are quotations fromthe Quran, poems, lists of persons who took part in different events, a few docu-ments (whose historical value shall not be discussed here) and comments andintroductory sentences to other material.14 Nothing of these latter types ofmaterial is included in any of the hadīth collections.

8 Wansbrough, The Sectarian Milieu, 78.9 Ibid., 87.10 Ibid., 76–8, and see below.11 Tilman Nagel, “Hadīt – oder: Die Vernichtung der Geschichte”, in XXV. Deutscher

Orientalistentag vom 8. bis 13.4.1991 in München. Vorträge (Stuttgart, 1994), 118–28, 126f.

12 Hinds, ‘“Maghāzī’ and ‘Sīra’ in early Islamic scholarship”, 63; ibid., “al-Maghāzī”, inEI2, V, 1161–4.

13 Cf. Andreas Görke, “Eschatology, history, and the common link: a study in method-ology”, in Herbert Berg (ed.), Method and Theory in the Study of Islamic Origins(Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), 179–208, 182, for an overview of changes that typi-cally occur in the course of transmission.

14 For a categorization of the different types of material included in works on maghāzī, cf.Watt, “The materials”, 24–31; Watt, “The reliability of Ibn-Ishāq’s sources”, in La Vie duprophète Mahomet. Colloque de Strasbourg (octobre 1980) (Paris, 1983), 31–43; WimRaven, “Sīra”, in EI2, IX, 660–3, 662 f.; see also Stefan Leder, “The literary use of theKhabar: a basic form of historical writing”, in L. Conrad and A. Cameron (eds), The

T H E R E L A T I O N S H I P B E T W E E N M A G H Ā Z Ī A N D H A D Ī T H 173

Our view of the range of material included in works on maghāzī is of courseheavily dependent on the extant sources, but there are indications that differenttypes of material played a role in maghāzī traditions in earlier periods and aretypical of the maghāzī literature. For instance, many early maghāzī scholarsare said to have included poems in their works.15 Maghāzī scholars who aresaid to have used poems or be lovers of poetry include: Abān b. ʿUthmān,16ʿUrwa b. al-Zubayr,17 Wahb b. Munabbih,18 ʿAbdallāh b. Abī Bakr,19

al-Zuhrī,20 and of course Ibn Ishāq, al-Wāqidī and, to a lesser extent, IbnSaʿd.21 The same applies to lists of participants, which some of the early auth-orities of maghāzī are said to have kept,22 and to documents, such as letters ofthe Prophet, which were included by some.23 Thus it is likely that earlier auth-orities on maghāzī collected different types of material of about the same scopeas are included in the later works of Ibn Ishāq, al-Wāqidī, and others.

It may be worth establishing the true scope of the intersection between thematerial included in books on maghāzī and that included in collections ofhadīth, but this is not our concern here. For our purposes we will concentrateon the material included both in books on maghāzī and in collections of hadīth.

Considering the differing aims of muhaddithūn and maghāzī scholars, it is tobe expected that they dealt differently with the material. The muhaddithūn wereprimarily interested in the transmission and preservation of the material accord-ing to certain standards, and in its legal or ritual relevance. They were consideredto be authorities on the reliability of certain transmitters and certain lines oftransmission, whether a certain tradition was more or less reliable or legallybinding, the exact wording of certain traditions, and on who was the original nar-rator of a story.

Maghāzī scholars on the other hand were interested in creating a continuousand coherent narrative of the life of Muhammad. To this end they had to drawconnections between different traditions and establish causalities between them.As we have seen, they also drew on different kinds of material. They were

Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, I: Problems in the Literary Source Material(Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1992), 277–315, 309f.

15 Cf. Kister, “The Sīrah literature”, 357–61; James T. Monroe, “The poetry of the Sīrahliterature”, in A.F.L. Beeston et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature.Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period (Cambridge, 1983), 368–73.

16 Horovitz, The Earliest Biographies of the Prophet and Their Authors (Princeton: TheDarwin Press, 2002), 14.

17 Ibid., 27–9.18 Ibid., 39; Raif Georges Khoury, Wahb b. Munabbih. Teil 1: Der Heidelberger Papyrus

PSR Heid Arab 23. Leben und Werk des Dichters (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1972), 144,146, 148.

19 Horovitz, The Earliest Biographies, 44 f.20 Ibid., 66.21 Ibid., 122.22 For instance Shurahbīl b. Saʿd and Mūsā b. ʿUqba (cf. Horowitz, The Earliest

Biographies, 30, 70).23 For instance ʿUrwa b. al-Zubayr, ʿAbdallāh b. Abī Bakr, and Mūsā b. ʿUqba (cf. Horovitz,

The Earliest Biographies, 27, 44, 71, 87).


considered experts not in the question of the authenticity of the material theyused, but in questions of context. The maghāzī scholars knew – or at leastwere supposed to know – when a certain event took place, its causes, andwhether or not it preceded another event. They were also experts on which peoplewere involved: they knew who was present at a certain event, how many peopletook part in a battle, if a specific individual took part in a battle, if someonebelonged to the muhājirūn or to the ansār, if someone died before or after a cer-tain event – the kind of information that could not usually be derived from asingle hadīth and could not be passed on by relying solely on ahādīth.

In order to form coherent narratives from their material, it was almost inevi-table that authors would have to abstain from naming informants, and among theoldest authorities on maghāzī, such as ʿUrwa b. al-Zubayr (d. 93 or 94), Saʿīdb. al-Musayyab (d. 94) and Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī (d. 125) we frequently find trad-itions given without any indication of their sources. It is precisely this handlingof the material that makes it possible to trace its origins back to the field ofmaghāzī and not to hadīth. This applies mainly to long traditions that containcomplete accounts of what happened at a certain event, mostly major eventsin the life of Muhammad such as the beginning of the revelation, the Hijra,the battles of Badr and Uhud, the treaty of al-Hudaybiya and the conquest ofMecca, to name but a few. The long traditions regarding these events are usuallymade up of several elements which are combined into a coherent narrative. Thatthey are made up of different and independent units can be seen since, in differ-ent versions of the narratives, these units often appear in a different order; some-times they even appear in different contexts.24 These stories often presuppose anomniscient narrator, a narrator who knows and reports what is happening andwhat is said both in the camp of the Muslims and in that of the Meccans. InʿUrwa b. al-Zubayr’s account of al-Hudaybiya, for instance, discussionsamong the Muslims and those among the Quraysh in Mecca (when their del-egates return from Muhammad), are reported in direct speech. Later in thisaccount, even the conversation between Abū Basīr and his two counterparts isgiven in direct speech.25 Such an omniscient narrator should not occur in thefield of hadīth, where the rules say that the original narrator has to be an eye-witness,26 particularly when direct speech is reported.27 Whether these werereally eyewitness reports or if this was just a literary convention is irrelevanthere. In any case, it would be against the rules for an original narrator to presentdialogues of scenes at which he cannot possibly have been present. Thus, whilethese stories do not conform to the standards of hadīth, they would still be

24 Cf. Andreas Görke and Gregor Schoeler, Die ältesten Berichte über das LebenMuhammads: Das Korpus ʿUrwa ibn az-Zubair (Princeton: The Darwin Press, 2008),266 f.

25 See e.g. al-Bukhārī, Muhammad b. Ismāʿīl, Sahīh al-Bukhārī, 3 vols (Vaduz: ThesaurusIslamicus Foundation 2000) Kitāb al-Shurūt , 15.

26 Cf. Sebastian Günther, “Fictional narration and imagination within an authoritativeframework. Towards a new understanding of Hadīth”, in Stefan Leder (ed.),Story-Telling in the Framework of Non-Fictional Arabic Literature (Wiesbaden:Harrassovitz, 1998), 433–71, 440 f., 464 f.

27 Cf. Daniel Beaumont, “Hard-boiled: narrative discourse in early Muslim traditions”,Studia Islamica 83, 1996, 5–31, 10, 18, 23.


considered to be akhbār.28 In general, the literary conventions of akhbār are notvery different from those of hadīth, but they seem to have been less strictlyobserved in fields outside hadīth proper. One notable distinction is that forakhbār it is characteristic that the narrator is absent from the narration.29 Thisis usually the case in these long narratives, but not necessarily in hadīth.

Many of these complex narratives were based on earlier accounts from differ-ent informants and constitute combined reports. Combined reports are a com-mon feature in Islamic historiography at least from the time of Ibn Ishāq andal-Wāqidī. They result from the merging of different accounts into a single nar-rative. Usually Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī (d. 124/742) is credited with introducing thetechnique of combined reports.30 This attribution to al-Zuhrī seems to be basedon his use of collective asānīd.31 However, there is evidence that earlier auth-orities of maghāzī already combined different reports to a coherent narrative,although they mostly did not provide them with collective asānīd. A comparisonof different versions of maghāzī traditions can provide evidence that the practiceof combining reports was common among early maghāzī authorities.32 A similarpractice can be observed in the field of the ayyām al-ʿarab,33 which may haveserved as a model for the maghāzī scholars.

At the beginning these reports seem to have been given without any mentionof isnād, and only later, possibly under the influence of the muhaddithūn, with akind of collective isnād. We can find narratives without an isnād going back toan eyewitness, for instance in the traditions of Shurahbīl b. Saʿd, ʿUrwab. al-Zubayr, al-Zuhrī, Wahb b. Munabbih, ʿAbdallāh b. Abī Bakr, ʿĀsimb. ʿUmar and Mūsā b. ʿUqba. The use of the collective isnād reached its highestdevelopment with al-Wāqidī, but it can also be found in Ibn Ishāq’s book.Occurrences of collective asānīd can also be detected in traditions from Mūsā

28 The distinction between hadīth and khabar was controversial among Muslim tradition-alists and remains so among scholars. For different views on the relationship betweenhadīth and khabar, cf. Pierre Larcher, “Le mot de hadīt vu par un linguiste”, inTilman Nagel and Claude Gilliot (eds), Das Prophetenhadīt: Dimensionen einer isla-mischen Literaturgattung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 7–13, 12 f.;Ella Landau-Tasseron, “Sayf Ibn ʿUmar in medieval and modern scholarship”, DerIslam 67, 1990, 1–16, 6–9; Muhammad Qasim Zaman, “Maghāzī and themuhaddithūn: reconsidering the treatment of ‘historical’ materials in early collectionof hadīth”, IJMES 28, 1996, 1–18; Rizwi S. Faizer, “The issue of authenticity regardingthe traditions of al-Wāqidī as established in his Kitāb al-Maghāzī”, JNES 58, 1999, 97–106, 100; Beaumont, “Hard-boiled”, 26 f.

29 Günther, “Fictional narration”, 464; Leder, “The literary use of the Khabar”, 307.30 E.g. Hamilton A. R. Gibb, “Ta’rīkh”, in Enzyklopaedie des Islām. Geographisches, eth-

nographisches und biographisches Wörterbuch der muhammedansichen Völker,Ergänzungsband (Leiden: Brill, 1938), 249–63, 251; ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dūrī, The Riseof Historical Writing among the Arabs, ed. and trans. Lawrence I. Conrad (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1983), 29; Michael Lecker, “Wāqidī’s account on the statusof the Jews of Medina: a study of a combined report”, JNES 54, 1995, 15–32, 19 f.

31 Cf. al-Dūrī, The Rise, 29, 111; Horovitz, “Alter und Ursprung”, 43.32 Görke and Schoeler, Die ältesten Berichte, 63, 68, 74–7, 90–1, 99.33 Geo Widengren, “Oral tradition and written literature among the Hebrews in the light

of Arabic evidence, with special regard to prose narratives”, Acta Orientalia 23, 1958,201–62, 234–9.


b. ʿUqba, al-Zuhrī and even ʿUrwa b. al-Zubayr, but they seem to be the excep-tion here rather than the rule.

With or without collective asānīd, these long and complex narratives origi-nated in all likelihood in the field of maghāzī, and not in the field of hadīth.Nevertheless, a number of them can also be found in hadīth collections, some-times in chapters on maghāzī, sometimes in other chapters, according to theirlegal implications.

These traditions thus enable us to observe how the muhaddithūn were dealingwith material which was originally part of the maghāzī tradition. Comparingdifferent versions of these long accounts as quoted in the works on maghāzīon the one hand and in hadīth collections on the other, it can be observedthat these long traditions are sometimes quoted in full in hadīth collections,while sometimes only the legally relevant parts are adduced, often in differentchapters of the same collection: quoting only part of a tradition was obviouslyconsidered to be an acceptable practice.

Wansbrough, in a study of the story of the slander about ʿĀ’isha, the hadīt al-ifk, argued on the basis of a critical analysis of three versions of the traditionthat the version included in al-Bukhārī’s hadīth collection is a late reworking ofthe basic narrative recorded by Ibn Ishāq. The purpose of the reduction of thestory to its “parabolic nucleus”, according to Wansbrough, was exclusively para-digmatic.34 However, Schoeler, on the basis of an analysis of the texts andasānīd of numerous versions of the tradition, showed that the version includedin al-Bukhārī’s collection is very close to the oldest recension of the story, whileIbn Ishāq combined different traditions to build his narrative.35 Thus in this casethere is no indication of a deliberate reshaping of the tradition to make it con-form to the needs of the muhaddithūn.

The hadīth al ifk is one of a number of long and complex narratives on the lifeof Muhammad going back to ʿUrwa b. al-Zubayr, versions of which are includedboth in maghāzī works and in hadīth collections. Some versions of these trad-itions are more elaborate and embellished than others, and some versions containelements lacking in others. But the versions adduced in hadīth collections do notdiffer in any systematic way from those quoted elsewhere; for instance they donot as a rule contain fewer names or omit place names. What can be observed,however, is that they are usually equipped with complete asānīd, while in theworks of maghāzī this may or may not be the case.

We may therefore infer that when muhaddithūn included material based onlong narratives originating in the field of maghāzī in their collections, theywere trying to get hold of the versions that best conformed to their standards.They also felt free to quote only part of a tradition, but they did not as a rulereshape the tradition to produce normative texts.

Where shorter traditions are involved things become more complicated;unlike the long narratives or combined reports, these would also conform tothe standards of hadīth. In this case it is more difficult to establish where a trad-ition originated and how it was employed in other fields.

34 Wansbrough, The Sectarian Milieu, 76–8.35 Gregor Schoeler, Charakter und Authentie der muslimischen Überlieferung über das

Leben Mohammeds (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1996), 142–3.


In what follows two case studies shall be discussed. The first consists of sev-eral versions of a tradition relevant to the discussion of whether it is permissibleto eat game while being in the ritual state of ihrām. They served Nagel as thebasis for his argument that the maghāzī materials were deprived of their histori-cal setting when they were transferred to the field of hadīth.36 First I will presenta common version of the tradition and then Nagel’s view of its development.The tradition in one version in al-Bukhārī’s Sahīh is given with the followingwording: ʿAbdallāh b. Abī Qatāda al-Aslamī narrates from his father, AbūQatāda, who says:

One day I was sitting with some of the Prophet’s companions on the wayto Mecca. The Prophet was ahead of us. Everybody was in the state ofihrām but I was not. While I was busy repairing my shoes, they saw awild ass. They did not tell me about it but they wished I had seen it.Then I looked up and saw it. So, I turned to the horse, saddled it andmounted it, but I forgot the whip and the spear. So I said to them:“Hand me the whip and the spear” but they said, “No, by God, we shallnot help you in that in any way”. I became angry and dismounted andpicked up both things. Then I mounted the horse again, went at the wildass and slew it. It died and I brought it to them. They took it and ate it.But then they had doubts about whether it was allowed for them to eatit while they were in the state of ihrām. We proceeded and I hid withme the wild ass’s forearm. We met the Prophet and asked him about thecase. He asked, “Do you have something of it with you?” I answered inthe affirmative and gave him the forearm. He ate it completely while hewas in the state of ihrām.37

There are several versions of this tradition and they differ in many details.Sometimes the Prophet simply allows the pilgrims to eat from the meat withoutdoing so himself, sometimes place names are given, in some versions theProphet asks if anyone has encouraged or ordered Abū Qatāda to hunt thewild ass, and only after this is denied does he allow the pilgrims to eat fromthe meat.38

36 Nagel, “Hadīt – oder: Die Vernichtung der Geschichte”, 127; Nagel, “Verstehen odernachahmen? Grundtypen der muslimischen Erinnerung an Mohammed”, in Jahrbuchdes Historischen Kollegs 2006, 73–94, 80–84.

37 al-Bukhārī, Sahīh, Kitāb al-hiba, 3.38 See e.g. al-Bukhārī, Sahīh, Kitāb jazā’ al-sayd, 2–5; ibid., Kitāb al-jihād, 46, 88; ibid.,

Kitāb al-at ʿima, 19; ibid., 2 vols, Kitāb al-dhabā’ih wa-l-sayd, 10, 11; Muslim b. Hajjāj,Sahīh Muslim, (Vaduz: Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation, 2000) 8. Kitāb al-hajj; Ahmadb. Shuʿayb al-Nasā’ī, Sunan, (Vaduz: Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation, 2000), KitābManāsik al-hajj, 78, 80, 81; ibid., Kitāb al-sayd wa-l-dhabā’ih, 32; Abū Dā’ūd, Kitābal-Manāsik, 42; Abū ʿĪsā Muhammad b. ʿĪsā al-Tirmidhī, Sunan al-Tirmidhī, 2 vols(Vaduz: Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation, 2000), Kitāb al-hajj, 25; Muhammadb. Yazīd Ibn Māja, Sunan Ibn Māja (Vaduz: Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation, 2000),Kitāb al-Manāsik, 93; Mālik b. Anas, al-Muwat ta’ (Vaduz: Thesaurus IslamicusFoundation, 2000), Kitāb al-hajj, 24; Ibn Hanbal, Musnad, V: 296, 301, 302, 304,305 f., 307, 308.


These details are of course important for the juridical aspect of this story:while it is forbidden to hunt in the state of ihrām, this tradition can be adducedas an argument that it is permitted to eat game so long as the muhrim is notinvolved in the hunting in any way. In fact, most elements of the traditionseem to serve a legal argumentation and show that Abū Qatāda’s companionsdid not help him in any way. They did not call his attention to the wild assand they did not hand him the whip or spear, although he asked them to do so.

Our main point of interest is the place name, as in some versions this story issaid to have taken place in the year of al-Hudaybiya on the way to Mecca.39 Thisis also the context in which al-Wāqidī places the story: it took place nearal-Abwā’, and although he does not mention all of the details given above,the outline of the story is the same.40

Nagel argued that this context, the story of the attempted pilgrimage ofMuhammad which resulted in the treaty of al-Hudaybiya, is indeed the originof this tradition. In his view, in the hadīth-version the connection toal-Hudaybiya was eliminated and instead the explicit permission ofMuhammad to eat the meat, which can be found in several versions of thehadīth, was added. The aim of this was to eliminate the historical context andinstead create a timeless, universally valid statement.41

However, this view is questionable: the tradition in question cannot be foundin the context of al-Hudaybiya in the maghāzī literature before the time ofal-Wāqidī. The hadīth was apparently not included by Ibn Ishāq and as I seeit was not transmitted by Mūsā b. ʿUqba, ʿUrwa b. al-Zubayr, al-Zuhrī or anyother famous authority of maghāzī. On the other hand, as we have seen, it is pre-sent in numerous hadīth collections and plays an important part in the questionof whether it is permitted for a muhrim to eat meat from hunted animals. InMuslim’s Sahīh, nine versions of this hadīth are presented next to six ahādīthgiving the opposite view, saying that Muhammad was in the state of ihrāmwhen he was offered meat from someone who hunted it and that he refusedto eat from it. Other hadīth collections offer a similar view: the Abū Qatādahadīth is one of several relevant to the question of whether a muhrim is allowedto eat game.

In most of these ahādīth no historical context is mentioned while in a fewversions of the Abū Qatāda hadīth it is mentioned that the incident happenedon the way to al-Hudaybiya or in the year of al-Hudaybiya. It is instructive tolook at the asānīd: all versions containing the reference to al-Hudaybiya sharethe common transmitter Yahyā b. Abī Kathīr, while Yahyā is not present inany version of the hadīth without reference to al-Hudaybiya. The only exceptionis the version adduced by al-Wāqidī, in which reference to al-Hudaybiya ismade, but in the isnād of which Yahyā b. Abī Kathīr is not mentioned.However, al-Wāqidī regularly uses fictitious asānīd in order not to reveal his

39 E.g., al-Bukhārī, Sahīh, Kitāb jazā’ al-sayd, 2–3; Muslim, Sahīh, Kitāb al-hajj, 8;al-Nasā’ī, Sunan, Kitāb Manāsik al-hajj, 80; Ibn Māja, Sunan, Kitāb al-Manāsik, 93;Ibn Hanbal, Musnad, 5: 301, 304.

40 al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, II, 576.41 Nagel, “Hadīt – oder: Die Vernichtung der Geschichte”, 127; Nagel, “Grundtypen”, 82 f.


true sources, as can be shown in several cases.42 We should not therefore pay toomuch attention to his indication of the tradition’s origin. Yahyā b. Abī Kathīrwould thus be a partial common link according to the terminology of GautierJuynboll.43 Juynboll was among the first to apply systematically the commonlink theory, first formulated by Joseph Schacht,44 and to develop it further, intro-ducing a number of helpful technical terms. While the significance of the com-mon link has been subject to debate,45 some conclusions can usually be drawnfrom a study of the asānīd and the respective variants in the transmitted texts.For instance, given that there are a large number of variants of one tradition,it seems safe to assume that a specific element in the text of a hadīth was intro-duced by a certain transmitter if this element occurs only in those variants thatwere passed on by this transmitter and does not occur in any other variant.

Judging from the asānīd we thus have to assume that it was Yahyā b. AbīKathīr who first made a connection between the Abū Qatāda hadīth andal-Hudaybiya. Yahyā b. Abī Kathīr died in 129 or 132,46 and although he isusually considered to be trustworthy, al-Tabarī accuses him of tampering withasānīd.47

Taking into account the markedly legal character and the prominence of theAbū Qatāda hadīth in the hadīth collections – it is found in all canonical andseveral other collections – and its relative absence from the maghāzī tradition,it is highly unlikely that this hadīth originated in the maghāzī tradition onal-Hudaybiya. On the contrary, we must assume that this hadīth was circulatingamong the muhaddithūn, that it was part of a purely legal discussion and that itwas only later included by al-Wāqidī in his material on the maghāzī. The contextapparently was provided within the legal discussion.

If this assumption is right, how can we explain that the hadīth was furnishedwith a historical context at a secondary stage within the legal discussion? Mightthis simply reflect a desire on the part of the transmitters to supply informationoriginally left vague? This is, of course, possible. However, in a legal discus-sion, the historical context was not of primary importance. On the other hand,the context may become important when it comes to the possible abrogationof ahādīth. Just as later verses from the Quran could abrogate contradicting ear-lier verses, the same was true for ahādīth. A legal decision taken by the Prophetin the last years of his life would invalidate earlier rulings to the contrary, as is

42 Görke and Schoeler, Die ältesten Berichte, 122, 142–4, 183–4, 215, 221, 248, 252, 254,266–7.

43 Cf. Gautier H. A. Juynboll, “Some isnād-analytical methods illustrated on the basis ofseveral women-demeaning sayings from hadīth literature”, al-Qantara. Revista de estu-dos árabes 10, 1989, 343–83, 352; Gautier H. A. Juynboll, Encyclopedia of CanonicalHadīth (Leiden: Brill, 2007), I, xx.

44 Joseph Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1950), 171–5.

45 Cf. Harald Motzki, “Dating Muslim traditions. A survey”, Arabica 52, 2005, 204–53,222–42; Görke, “Eschatology, history, and the common link”, 188.

46 Shams al-Dīn Muhammad b. ʿUthmān al-Dhahabī, Ta’rīkh al-Islām wa-wafayātal-mashāhir wa-l-aʿlām, ed. ʿU. Tadmurī, 51 vols (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī 1409/1989–1421/2000), 8: 297–9.

47 Abū Jaʿfar Muhammad b. Jarīr al-Tabarī, Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk (Annales), ed.M. J. de Goeje et al., 15 vols (Leiden: Brill 1879–1901), III, 2503.


explained for instance in Ibn al-Salāh’s ʿUlūm al-hadīth.48 Books on abrogatingand the abrogated in the hadīth form a literary genre of their own. The editor ofIbn Shāhīn’s Kitāb Nāsikh al-hadīth wa-mansūkhihi, Karīma bt. ʿAlī, lists four-teen works on the topic.49 None of the works she mentions date from before thethird century AH; however, it is most likely that the discussions about abrogationin hadīth predate the first works dedicated to the topic considerably. Providingthe Abū Qatāda hadīth with a context in the year of al-Hudaybiya, only fouryears before Muhammad’s death, could strengthen the position of those scholarswho argued that the muhrim is allowed to eat game, since the hadīth might beabrogating earlier ahādīth to the contrary. Al-Wāqidī was himself an expert infiqh,50 and included far more legal ahādīth in his work than did for instanceIbn Ishāq.51 It is conceivable that al-Wāqidī included the Abū Qatāda hadīthin his account on al-Hudaybiya not only because he felt that this was its correcthistorical context, but also because the legal view expressed in this hadīth cor-responded to his own opinion. He does quote a tradition to the contrary –

Muhammad refuses to take a piece of wild ass offered to him because he isin the state of ihrām – immediately following the Abū Qatāda hadīth.52 Butin the context of the farewell pilgrimage, yet another similar story is told: some-one on the way offers Muhammad a wild ass he hunted. Muhammad and hiscompanions are in the state of ihrām and Muhammad offers the meat to them,saying that it is allowed for them, so long as they did not hunt themselves nororder someone else to do so.53 Whether or not al-Wāqidī included these trad-itions to support a legal view, it should have become clear that this traditionfirst circulated among legal and hadīth scholars and was only transferred tothe maghāzī-tradition at a secondary stage.

The second case consists of several versions of a tradition dealing with awoman who committed theft and who is punished by having her hand cutoff. The tradition again is found in numerous versions that differ in severaldetails.54 A typical version adduced by al-Bukhārī reads as follows:

ʿĀ’isha narrated that the Quraysh were worried about the woman fromMakhzūm who had committed theft. They said, “Who can speak (in favour

48 In the 34th category on abrogating and abrogated hadīth. Ibn al-Salāh al-Shahrazūrī,ʿUlūm al-hadīth, ed. Nūr al-Dīn ʿItr, (Dimašq: Dār al-Fikr, 1406/1986), 286–8, esp. 288.

49 Ibn Shāhīn, Kitāb Nāsikh al-hadīth wa-mansūkhihi, ed. Karīma bt. ʿAlī (Bayrūt: Dāral-Kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1420/1999), 55–7.

50 Leder, “al-Wākidī”, EI2, XI, 101.51 Horowitz, The Earliest Biographies, 115.52 al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, II, 576.53 al-Wāqidī, al-Maghāzī, III, 1092 f.54 E.g. al-Bukhārī, Sahīh, al-Shahādāt, 8; ibid., Ahādīth al-anbiyā’, 57; ibid., al-Maghāzī,

55; ibid., al-Hudūd, 12, 13; Muslim, Sahīh, al-Hudūd, 2; Abū Dā’ūd, Sunan, al-Hudūd4, 15; al-Trimidhī, Sunan, al-Hudūd, 6; al-Nasā’ī, Sunan, Qat ʿ al-Sāriq 5, 6; Ibn Māja,Sunan, al-Hudūd, 6; Ibn Hanbal, Musnad, VI, 162; ʿAbd al-Razzāq b. Hammāmal-Sanʿānī, Kitāb al-Musannaf, ed. H. R. al-Aʿzamī, 11 vols (Beirut: al-Majlis al-ʿilmi,1970–72), X, 201 f.; Muhammad b. ʿAbdallāh al-Hākim al-Nīsābūrī, al-Mustadrakʿalā l-Sahīhayn, ed. M. ʿA. ʿAtā, 5 vols, 2nd. ed. (Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmīya,1422/2002), 379 f.; Ibn Saʿd, al-Tabaqāt al-kabīr, ed. E. Sachau et al., 9 vols,(Leiden: Brill, 1904–28), VI.1, 48 f.; VIII, 192 f.


of her) to the Prophet and who would dare to do so except Usāma, thefavourite of the Prophet?” So Usāma spoke to the Prophet, and theProphet replied, “Do you intercede against one of the legal punishmentsof God?” Then he got up and addressed the people, saying, “O people!Those before you went astray because if a noble person committed theft,they used to leave him, but if a weak person among them committedtheft, they used to inflict the legal punishment on him. By God, ifFātima, the daughter of Muhammad [i.e. his own daughter] committedtheft, Muhammad would cut off her hand!”55

While in most versions of this hadīth it is not indicated where or when theincident happened, in some versions the story is said to have taken place duringthe conquest of Mecca.56 Following the arguments of Wansbrough or Nagel weshould assume that the story is taken from the maghāzī material and that theform given above – which does not mention this historical context – is a laterreworking. But the story is not found in this context in most of the books onmaghāzī. It is mentioned by Ibn Saʿd and Ibn Kathīr, but not by al-Wāqidī orIbn Ishāq. It is often quoted on the authority of al-Zuhrī and ʿUrwab. al-Zubayr, but it is not included in their long accounts of the conquest ofMecca.57

It is helpful to look at the variants in more detail. The tradition is included inʿAbd al-Razzāq’s Musannaf, where the person intervening in favour of thewoman is once given as Usāma b. Zayd (which is the most popular version),and once as ʿUmar b. Abī Salama.58 Muslim once names Umm Salama as theone who intercedes on behalf of the woman.59 Ibn Saʿd once gives the nameof the woman – who is not usually mentioned by name – as Fātima bt.al-Aswad b. ʿAbd al-Asad and once as Umm ʿAmr bt. Sufyān b. ʿAbdal-Asad. In the latter case the affair is said to have happened at the farewell pil-grimage.60 It is interesting to note that Ibn Saʿd mentions the incident only in thebiographical entries of Usāma b. Zayd61 and Fātima bt. al-Aswad,62 but not inthe passages on the conquest of Mecca or the farewell pilgrimage.

It is very probable that this alleged saying of Muhammad, too, was providedwith a context only at a secondary stage: there are different versions regardingboth the persons involved and the historical context, which is given either asthe conquest of Mecca or the farewell pilgrimage. As in the case of the AbūQatāda tradition, a study of the asānīd indicates who may be responsible forestablishing a connection between the story and the conquest of Mecca: all ver-sions placing the story in this context of the conquest share the transmitters

55 al-Bukhārī, Sahih, Hudūd, 12.56 E.g. al-Bukhārī, Sahih, al-Shahādāt, 8; ibid., Maghāzī, 55; Muslim, Sahih, al-Hudūd, 2;

Abū Dā’ūd, Sunan, al-Hudūd. 4; al-Nasā’ī, Sunan, Qat ʿ al-Sāriq, 6.57 Görke and Schoeler, Die ältesten Berichte, 240, 242–4.58 ʿAbd al-Razzāq, al-Musannaf, x, 201 f.59 Muslim, Sahīh, Hudūd, 2 (last tradition).60 Ibn Saʿd, al-Tabaqāt, VIII, 192 f.61 Ibn Saʿd, al-Tabaqāt, IV.1, 48 f.62 Ibn Saʿd, al-Tabaqāt, VIII, 192 f.


ʿAbdallāh b. Wahb (125–197)63 and Yūnus (d. 152 or 159),64 while all versionstransmitted by other individuals do not establish this connection. As bothʿAbdallāh and Yūnus occur in all versions mentioning Mecca, we cannot besure who ultimately made the connection, but it seems probable that the connec-tion was not made before the first half of the second century.

The variants regarding historical context and persons involved as well as thefact that the tradition cannot be found in the works on maghāzī prior to Ibn Saʿdmake it probable that it is a legal tradition only later included in works onmaghāzī. As in the case of the Abū Qatāda tradition, it is not unlikely that theassociation of the story with events in the last years of the Prophet – the conquestof Mecca and the farewell pilgrimage – was made in support of the legal impli-cations of the hadīth and results from the discussion about abrogation of hadīth.Another possible explanation would again be the desire to supply additionalinformation, which in this case might account for the conflicting identificationsof the woman and those interceding on her behalf. In any case, the historicalcontext seems to have been provided only at a secondary stage, but still withinthe legal discussion. This historical context, provided in some variants of thetradition, led to their eventual inclusion in works on maghāzī.

The case studies adduced above suggest that it is indeed possible in somecases to establish that the occurrence of a tradition in one field preceded itsuse in another. That some traditions were employed in one field before theywere transferred to others is not per se surprising and can best be explainedby envisaging different circles of scholars discussing different issues.Traditions with juristic content would circulate mainly among jurists andhadīth scholars, while traditions with historical content would circulate mainlyamong those occupied with the maghāzī or related fields.

We have seen that traditions in the course of transmission were subject tochange; the circumstances of transmission and the different interests of the trans-mitters involved shaped them and led to the emergence of numerous variants ofa tradition. The fact that hadīth and maghāzī scholars had different aims and pri-orities when passing on traditions this left its mark on those traditions.65

We can therefore show that some traditions – the long coherent accounts ofthe main events in the life of Muhammad, but possibly other traditions too –

were included in the field of hadīth only after they obtained their basic formin maghāzī circles. On the other hand we have juristic ahādīth that were onlyintroduced into the field of maghāzī after they had circulated among hadīthscholars and were shaped by them. The transfer of traditions from one field tothe other did not necessarily involve any deliberate changes to the text.

It is less obvious than it first seems that maghāzī material found its way intosome collections of hadīth. Of course, it can be argued that everything the

63 al-Dhahabī, Ta’rīkh al-Islām, XIII, 264–9.64 al-Dhahabī, Ta’rīkh al-Islām, IX, 674.65 These circles, of course, should not be regarded as exclusive. We know of several auth-

orities in maghāzī who were also considered to be experts in law or hadīth, and they maybe partly responsible for the traditions spreading from one circle to the other. However, itseems reasonable to assume that the different conventions prevailing in the differentfields led to different changes.


Prophet did is sunna and therefore everything from the maghāzī tradition mightbecome part of the hadīth as long as it met the formal standards. But as we knowthe ahl al-maghāzī were often said to be transmitting traditions according tostandards that were not acceptable to the muhaddithūn, and so themuhaddithūn sometimes adduced maghāzī material although it did not reallyconform to their standards. We can find such traditions, for instance combinedreports going back only to ʿUrwa b. al-Zubayr or al-Zuhrī and not to an eyewit-ness in ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s or Ibn Abī Shayba’s Musannafs.

Apparently, the traditions of some of the authorities on maghāzī were deemedby the muhaddithūn to be good enough to be included in their works. It seemsthat this happened only with traditions of those early maghāzī scholars who werealso known for their expertise in hadīth, as Saʿīd b. al-Musayyab, ʿUrwab. al-Zubayr, ʿAbdallāh b. Abī Bakr, or al-Zuhrī.66 The combined reports oflater authorities in both maghāzī and hadīth, such as Mūsā b. ʿUqba were notadopted by the muhaddithūn.

The versions included in the canonical hadīth collections are usually the oneswith the best isnād. It is not clear at this point whether the isnād was deliberatelyimproved when the materials came to be used and transmitted by themuhaddithūn, or whether the muhaddithūn simply selected the versions withthe best asānīd from all the different versions that existed. In some cases, theisnād of one of the informants, of one part of the combined report, seems tohave been regarded as the isnād for the whole tradition.

Maghāzī scholars, on the other hand, did not of course have a problem includ-ing juristic ahādīth in their materials. Apparently, as the corpus of hadīth wasgrowing and the first collections of hadīth were emerging, maghāzī scholarswere starting to use and exploit these sources as they were using poems, versesfrom the Quran, stories from qussās and other material. This is a trend that seemsto have continued for a long time: Ibn Ishāq does not quote many explicitly legalahādīth, yet al-Wāqidī has a large number of these ahādīth and Ibn Kathīradduces even more. This is of course not necessarily a general developmentbut might also be due to the personal preferences of the authors.

The influence of hadīth on maghāzī is not limited to the additional material itprovided. Maghāzī scholars were also influenced by the muhaddithūn regardingformal aspects of transmission. The use of the isnād – the backbone of thesciences of hadīth – came to be more important in the field of maghāzī. Itwas quite possibly the scholars versed in both hadīth and maghāzī who firstadvocated and advanced the use of the isnād in the field of maghāzī, and theimportance of the isnād and its use in the field of maghāzī was continuallygrowing.

It is noteworthy that the early expert in maghāzī and hadīth, ʿUrwab. al-Zubayr, only occasionally gave indications of his sources in his long his-torical accounts. This is in contrast to the legal or exegetical traditions trans-mitted on his authority, which are usually provided with asānīd that includeʿUrwa’s sources. However, it is impossible to say whether these asānīd grew

66 Cf. Horovitz, The Earliest Biographies, 12, 23, 27, 55, 60 ff.; see also Leder, “The lit-erary use of the Khabar”, 313.


backwards and were improved in the course of transmission. A generation later,with Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī, it had become customary to furnish the long historicaltraditions with some kind of isnād, but there are still traditions attributed to himand not traced back any further. A further generation later, with Ibn Ishāq, itseems to have become the rule that most of the material should be introducedwith an isnād; Ibn Ishāq regularly employs collective asānīd when he introduceshis combined reports, and so does al-Wāqidī.

We may conclude that although the fields of maghāzī and hadīth are closelyrelated, they remained distinct.67 They influenced each other, and quite a numberof traditions from one field could also be seen relevant to the other. But neithercan the maghāzī be regarded as secondary to and derived from the hadīth, norcan the opposite view be upheld.

67 Cf. Landau-Tasseron, “Sayf Ibn ʿUmar”, 9, who comes to a similar conclusion.


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